In 1991, a twenty-two-year-old Australian free-jazz drummer named Oren Ambarchi made his yearly pilgrimage to New York, looking for records and a chance to see live acts unlikely to make the trip to his home city of Melbourne. At the Knitting Factory, then on East Houston Street, he saw Keiji Haino, a forty-nine-year-old Japanese musician who had long black hair with bangs. In skinny wraparound shades popular with English mods in the sixties, Haino made high-pitched noises with his mouth while playing a Gibson SG electric guitar. The unified effect, over the course of ninety minutes, was more like the sound of a wounded velociraptor or a metal rigging collapsing than anything as pedestrian as chords. Ambarchi decided, right there, to pick up the guitar.

Over the next twenty years, Ambarchi released more than thirty albums as a guitarist. In 2011, he had a chance to close the circle. A friend of his, a musician from Seattle named Stephen O’Malley, suggested they invite Haino to play as a trio in Amsterdam, with Ambarchi on drums, O’Malley on bass, and Haino on guitar. Although they all knew each other, they had never played together. A year later, the group played in Berlin, this time under a name Haino had chosen, Nazoranai. As O’Malley described it to me, Nazoranai relates to traditional Japanese calligraphy, meaning “not to follow the exact movement of the teacher or the master, to not follow the line, but to develop some sort of individuality.” This is reflected in the band’s working methods: beyond basic logistical discussions, there are no rehearsals.

Nazoranai is so thrilling because its improvisations don’t simply average out the work the three members have already done. Ambarchi’s own releases play with the more meditative zones of dissonance and improvisation, while O’Malley’s work tends to the more extreme edges of volume and pitch, often shaking rooms with detuned strings that reach into the silt below most other sounds. Haino, alone or in collaboration, moves through peaks of rebarbative guitar sounds, which are followed by equal amounts of silence and unexpectedly quiet vocal invocations. On Nazoranai’s first self-titled album, and the forthcoming “II,” there is a range of motion and sound. Restricted to bass and drums, O’Malley and Ambarchi do a remarkable job of framing the man they refer to as “the maestro.” There are passages of dark and glossy depths, near-silent, on both albums, in addition to fearsome swells that are at once violently noisy and oddly natural. Live shows, though, are where the band finds its voice, again and again, summoning as much logic as madness. Nazoranai plays the Knitting Factory, now in Brooklyn, on May 21. ♦